The Economic Chart

…that may doom Obama’s presidency. Happy talk about how many jobs Obama has created isn’t going to cut it in the face of numbers like this. It’s the most anemic recovery in decades, and it’s not going to get any better with the policies in place.

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10 thoughts on “The Economic Chart”

One metric to keep an eye on when Obama talks about adding jobs is that the US population increases by about 1% a year, or 3 million people. To keep the same fraction employed (about 45%) requires the creation of 1.3 to 1.4 million jobs a year, which is over 110,000 jobs a month. That’s the minimum required to maintain the current low employment rate. Recovery is going to take much more than that.

Following along with what George said, the opposition should label it and mention it incessantly. That is, figure out “maintenance level”, then discuss every jobs report in terms of that. Both a the short term ‘this is how many people we needed to add this week to tread water’, and the longer term ‘this is how many people we’re short overall under BHO.’ (Integrate it.) Meaning responses to the press like:

Press: So how about that 100,000 jobs created this month? Huh, huh, huh?
Me: That’s 10,000 below maintenance level, and that just grows how much we’re underwater from 3,300,000 to 3,310,000 under our glorious leader.
Press(eventually): Maintenance level? What’s that? Underwater? Huh?

Pick better terms if they can be found, but pound exactly the same terms ad nauseum.

Obama is his own worst enemy. The recession was over a few months after he took office thanks to TARP but his over regulation, war on the business class, and stifling of the energy sector stagnated the recovery. Oh, and freaking out businesses with Obamacare didn’t help either.

Well one thing to remember is that Obama completely understands the benefits of institutionalizing. So there will be an even greater flurry of executive orders and regulatory declarations. He will only have a couple of months rather than another 4 years.

What I find interesting about the chart is that the prior recessions all seem like classic Hayek: boom (GDP moving above the trend line), which then plants the seeds for the following bust back down to the trend line. This most recent recession seems to be missing the boom, though. It makes me wonder about the trend line, and whether the recent “Real GDP” stats are accurate.

In particular, the housing bubble doesn’t have an above-the-trend component. Why is that?